Author: Sebastian Zimmer

Digitalized and born-digital documents are being changed all the time. How can we discuss changes like “rephrasing a sentence” when all the computer sees is a different string of bits? In the talk “The CMV+P document model” Dr. Gioele Barabucci (CCeH) will introduce a novel document model that allows humans and computer to compare different documents and different versions of the same document at multiple interpretative levels.

When and where

The talk will be held on the 24th of October, 11:00 in the Seminar room of the CCeH (Universitätsstraße 22).

Abstract

The CMV+P model is a layered document model that can describe any electronic document. Each document is seen a stack of layered abstraction levels, each characterized by three components: Content, Model and Variant. This layered structure allows for the co-existence of many separate and concurrent document formats. Such a structure is needed to refer with precision to parts of a changing document, as well as to identify at which of these layer a modification has been done (did I modify some bits or did a split a paragraph of text?).

When and where

The talk will be held on May 11th 2016, 17:00-18:30 in the Seminar room of the CCeH (Universitätsstraße 22).

Abstract

The web is in ongoing and rapid evolution. Often there is a huge gap between what browsers offer and web-developers’ knowledge, within the fields of multi-threading programming, network interception, offline management, 3d APIs, inter-context communication, hardware and networking APIs and so on. I will focus on two main issues: firstly, the reason why we should consider any web-page at the same level as an application; secondly, how browsers can offer functionalities in order to reach the complexity and performance of native apps: for instance, JIT, WebGL and multi-threading computation.
I would like to have a horizontal discussion with the DH community about HTML5 and web technologies in general, as well as a deep conversation about new standards. It would be interesting to hear more about your projects and your interests in order to create new networks and exchange ideas.

Andrea Marchesini is currently working in Mozilla platform – hacking on DOM, WebAPIs, Workers, privacy and security components.

How has the Web changed since its inception? In which direction(s) is it evolving at the moment? In the talk “The Web stack in 2016: From the original static web sites to the current bleeding-edge web technologies” Dr. Gioele Barabucci (CCeH) will discuss how the Web has progressed since its early days at CERN.

When and where

The talk will be held on May 10th 2016, 14:00-16:00 in the Seminar room of the CCeH (Universitätsstraße 22).

Abstract

The talk will touch many technical details but also more general aspects of the development of the web. It will show how the Web worked originally (a simple server sending static files and a simple browser visualizing static HTML pages) and how it works now (with layers of middleware, with a lot of computation being moved into the clients via JS or NaCL, with clients being small devices with 10cm screens and with pages generated on the fly via PHP or XQuery). How did we get here? How will things evolve from this point? Does the development of the Web conflicts with the will to preserve all the data and the knowledge that flows through it?

Abstract:
When taking a closer look at natural sciences and engineering the use of concepts, methods and technologies of computer science is in an advanced stage. In comparison, the use of techniques and methods of computer science in the humanities is still rather marginal. This is what the Digital Humanities wants to change. In this talk we provide a brief overview on the paradigm of eScience and the scientific method. Influenced by this, we outline our method to derive costume languages in movies based on the concepts of formal languages, ontologies and pattern languages. These concepts are used quite frequently in computer science but haven’t been seriously applied to answer questions from the media science. By generalizing the approach for costumes to other domains in the humanities, we want to outline how these ideas can be of advantage for the humanities.